22

About the crimes committed
in Kampuchea by the pro-Peking rulers

I. Shchedrov

p Pravda, January 25, 1979

p “The manager of the co-operative, one of his assistants and the team leader were shot in full view of the villagers. We were told that they were traitors.. . . And then a mother of two was beaten to death with bamboo sticks.”

p “... Thirty families in my village were driven out to its edge and shot. I saw the trench—fifteen metres long and two metres wide. The bodies lay there in the water for a long time, were mixed with grass and manure and used as fertiliser.”

p Those are eye-witness accounts by Kampucheans who miraculously survived the genocide that was daily perpetrated there during the years of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime. Ith Somphol told me about what had taken place in his native village of Preknorin in 1977, and San Kanda described a tragedy that happened at the other end of long-suffering Kampuchea last year.

p There is yet another eye-witness account by Prok Sam, one of the Kampucheans who was forced to leave Pnom Penh. 23 In the village of Pnomsrok, where he was resettled, he was ordered to join a work crew of 230 men. “There were allmale work crews and all-female ones. Men and women were supposed to work separately. I married in 1976. Right after our wedding night we were separated for four whole months. ...”

p The export version of the “cultural revolution”, which turned the country into a vast concentration camp, was a Peking brainchild. The frontiers were open only to the thousands of Chinese advisers. In fact, Peking was the main inspirer of the monstrous genocidal experiment of creating a new order odious to the people. What that new order was like can be judged from an admission made by Pol Pot himself in the spring of 1978, at the very time when San Kanda’s fellow villagers were taken out of their homes and lined up before the firing squad outside the village.

p “We only need one million Kampucheans to build the new society,” said this advocate of the Chinese-type political system in Kampuchea. But what was to become of the other millions? Over the forty-four months of the pro-Peking clique’s arbitrary rule, many hundreds of thousands of people were executed in cold blood.

p It is clear that, without support from Peking, the puppet regime would never have lasted so long in the face of the Kampuchean people’s mounting anger. The New York Times (whose sympathies are far removed from the Kampuchean patriots) called the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime “a replica of Auschwitz”, “the gloomiest period in the history of the 20th century”. The paper was compelled to admit: “The Pol Pot butchers sadistically murdered many Cambodians. As to the instruments of murder and torture, these were supplied by China to their Cambodian vassals.” Curiously, even Prince Sihanouk, whom Peking sent to New York to pose as a representative of the “legitimate” Pol Pot government, himself denounced the regime. He as much as declared that he had been a prisoner of the ruling clique.

p Let us recall how this dictatorial, martial regime was imposed upon Kampuchea and how the country was used as a launching-pad for international provocations. In the spring of 24 1975, after five years of armed resistance, Kampuchea was liberated from a pro-American-puppet administration. Guerilla detachments entered Pnom Penh, and the capital enthusiastically saluted its liberators. Then Pol Pot was brought to Pnom Penh onboard a Chinese aircraft and began to implement a China-style “cultural revolution" in Kampuchea.

p The accounts by refugees give an idea of how it all happened. More than three million townspeople were forcefully resettled in rural areas. They were prohibited from moving around the countryside, and many families were split. The Pnom Penh rulers abolished money by a stroke of the pen. Schools and hospitals were closed down, all postal and telegraph services for civilians were abolished. All boys and girls of 12-14 were formed into work crews. For all the forced labour they did, they received only a scant food ration. Millions of people were labelled as foreign agents and reactionaries. Anyone who refused or was unable to obey the resettlement orders was put to death. National minorities, including the Cham and mountain tribes, were subjected to wholesale genocide. Many of the Kampucheans escaped to neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand. Among the victims of the pro-Peking regime were those who had taken up arms with the guerrillas or engaged in underground revolutionary activities, fighting for the freedom and independence of Kampuchea.

p The country was artificially cut off from the outside world and turned into a seat of tension in South-East Asia. The Pol Pot regime, following Peking’s orders, forced the Kampucheans to spill their blood in clashes with the Vietnamese, their allies in the liberation struggle. Kampuchean detachments landed on the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc. They also raided the Vietnamese frontier provinces of Tay Ninh and Ha Tien. The Kampuchean rulers also ’set up a network of secret schools for training saboteurs and spies, who were then infiltrated into neighbouring countries.

p Early in 1978, the Pol Pot regime broke off diplomatic relations with Vietnam and stepped up provocations against its neighbour. It was no accident that this coincided with the launching of an all-out anti-Vietnamese campaign by Peking. In liberated Pnom Penh, the patriots found a school the 25 clique had turned into a real prison. A slogan written on one wall read: “Supported by China, we must rout Vietnam!" Surely proof enough that the deposed regime acted hand in glove with the Chinese hegemonists!

The popular resistance movement swept the dictators out of Kampuchea. Fleeing across the Kampuchean border together with them are the Chinese “experts”, thus marking the ignoble end of Peking’s experiment. The perpetrators of genocide will not escape their just retribution from the Kampucheans, the retribution of the peoples.